Dwellbeing App

Liberty Mutual App Research

 

Role : UX Researcher

Purpose

LM develops an App that teaches homeowners how to care and maintain their home through a personalize task plan, with a step by step instructions and a central place for home information.

The Problem : Beta and Ethnocentric Testing with Insurance Agents and Home owners
The clients want to carry out a research/survey on the receptive of this application by home owners, to know if its actually valuable to home owners, how much it can save home owners, and benefits to Insurance agents.

Methodology

Ethnographic Research

Semi-structured interviews with homeowners 

- Moderated Interview Sessions with 21 Homeowners
- Users were given key information and asked to complete tasks
- Users did not get any help to complete tasks
- Users were not trained to use the application
- All users were new to the app; allowing us to evaluate first time user understanding of the application
- Users were asked to evaluate the app: likes and dislikes, expectations, needs and wants
- Users were first taken though the test app, then they were next shown varying designs of the dashboard and a task page
- Users were asked to rate the new designs on usefulness and visual appeal

 

Approach

Phase 1 : strong>Interview with Insurance Agents

Phase 2: strong>Interview with Home owners

 

In-Home Interviews

A total of21 User tested interviews in the Chicago and Wisconsin Milwaukee area. New homeowners, landlords, people with young children, and recently widowed. Although very diverse group, all found value in the tasks they were given. This helped refine the task page to follow order of operations. Emphasis on the benefit of the tasks to motivate users.

 

 

Objectives

Usability testing conducted to:
- Identify usability problems (labels, language, features)
- Test with users completing specified tasks in a familiar environment 
- Determine if the interface is effective, efficient, and well received by users
- Gain perspective from the target audience
- Uncover usability highlights and discover usability improvement opportunities
- Gather homeowner insights: what they like/dislike about the application
- Gather homeowner insights: how and why they maintain their homes
- Test varying design options to gauge user likes/dislikes
- Discover how users prefer to learn/consume information: audio, video, illustrations, text or a mix

 

 

 

 

What we learned

We found that people tend to struggle with knowing what they should be doing to best maintain their home. Often they are reactive to when things break. But this is causing unnecessary costs and increasing risk for damage. People wish they had something could plan for them. Because let's face it, dad can't help you with everything.

found that learning home maintenance tasks is hard for more than just the new home owner.

 

 

 

 

Survey Questions

- I think I would recommend that my friends/family use the Dwellbeing application.
- I found the Dwellbeing application unnecessarily complex.
- I thought the application was easy to use.
- I think I would need the support of a technical person to use this mobile application.
- I thought this application was NOT very useful and I would not use it.
- I think most people would learn to use this application very quickly.
- I found the application very cumbersome to use.
- I felt very confident using this application on my mobile phone.